14 DAY TRIAL // A group of researchers drilling underneath the Antarctic ice sheet in 2009 made an amazing discovery when they identified an ampiphod swimming some 12.5 miles away from open water. Researchers now say that the finding has great implications for how life may endure on other worlds.
Though many moons in the solar system – such as Saturn's Titan and Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa – appear to be plagued by very severe conditions, some of the areas on their surfaces and underneath are actually quite similar to various regions in the Antarctic.
Some basins on the Southern Continent are even used as Mars analogs, because they represent a frozen, dry desert, covering up rock-hard soils. As such, it stands to reason that making impressive discoveries at the South Pole may be considered the equivalent of making the same findings on other worlds.
During the decade-long Census for Marine Life (CML) – the largest ocean-oriented research effort, which included more than 70 countries – scientists found no less than 150 new fish species, many of which were living in conditions initially thought to be hostile to life.
Some of those habitats, which included hydrothermal vents that heated the water around them to 407 degrees Celsius (764.6 degrees Fahrenheit), are similar to locations on other planets, such as Mars and Venus. Temperatures on the latter average at the level found to exist near the underwater vents.
“The age of discovery is not over. [New findings] are provocative for NASA and for people who are interested in life in places other than Earth,” explains US Sloan Foundation program manager Jesse Ausubel. The organization sponsored the CML partially.
Lifeforms such as crustaceans, jellyfish and single-celled animals were also found living in the Weddell Sea of Antarctica, some 200 kilometers away from open waters, and under 700 meters of ice.
“You can think of it as a cave, one of the remotest caves on Earth,” Ausubel says. “Wherever we've gone on Earth we've continued to find life," adds Southampton Oceanography Center (SOC) expert Chris German.
Enceladus and Europa are the most promising targets for finding life elsewhere in the solar system. Titan is covered in thick hazes of toxic chemicals and features lakes of liquid hydrocarbons (methane and ethane) on its surface, wheres the other two bodies are covered by thic ice sheets.
These protective shells may defend life underneath the ice from the harmful effects of radiation, and could be providing enough heat to allow for simple organisms to develop.
Unfortunately, only direct missions to those worlds, capable of drilling through miles of ices, can provide us with evidence to these theories, Daily Galaxy reports.